Graduate
Education | One year after graduate students voted on whether
to unionize, the group seeking to organize them sent this message
to the University: Count the votes.

Members of Graduate Employees TogetherUPenn (GET-UP) led a two-day
strike to protest the Universitys continued appeal of a National
Labor Relations Board ruling that gave about 1,000 graduate students
in Penns non-professional schools the right to form a union.
After the appeal was filed last February, the ballots were removed
before they could be tallied. The University maintains that the graduate
students are students, and not employees of Penn, and
therefore have no right to unionize.

According to GET-UP spokesman Dillon Brown, more than 200 classes
or recitations were cancelled on February 26 and February 27 during
the strike. We feel that the strike was successful in a number of
ways, he said. It communicated to the administration that we are
very seriously determined to resolve this disagreement; it raised
awareness of our predicament and our concerns to an unprecedented
level on campus; it galvanized support both inside our organization
and from undergraduates, faculty, University staff, and community
organizations. Brown added, We are disappointed that the University
administration apparently feels that our votes should continue to
be uncounted, leaving an unpleasant and increasingly contentious labor
dispute in the hands of the incoming president.

Dr. Peter Conn, deputy provost and the Andrea Mitchell Professor of
English, gave a different picture of the event. Id say
the strike ended up being informational only and had no impact on
the day-to-day operations of the University. Classes and other campus
activities continued as usual. He added, The University
has no intention of dropping the appeal and will wait for the NLRB
to rule.

Among other things, supporters of unionization seek higher pay for
graduate students and more training before they teach classes. Graduate
students currently receive free tuition, medical insurance, and a
stipend of $15,000 or more per academic year. The University maintains
that the students are already well compensated and that teaching and
research duties are a critical part of their own education.

Mixed views of the strike filled the news and opinion pages of The
Daily Pennsyl-vanian. In a DP guest column, Dr. Lawrence
Sherman, the Greenfield Professor of Human Relations and chair of
the criminology department, had little sympathy for graduate students
claims of inadequate pay, reflecting on how he had to pay his own
tuition as a graduate student at Yale and calculating that the typical
Penn graduate stipend works out to about $25 an hour over a 600-hour
academic year. They are completely at liberty to work for other
income in the summer and winter vacations, he added.

He also challenged the notion that graduate students were poorly prepared
for teaching classes. Penns School of Arts and Sciences
spends far more money training standing faculty and other teachers
than any other university I know. Yet teaching, like surgery, can
only be learned by doing it, not by studying it.

However, two other faculty members, Dr. David Ludden C72 Gr78,
professor of history, and Dr. Robert Vitalis, associate professor
of political science, backed GET-UPs efforts in another DP
guest column. Lost in nostalgic accounts of the bootstrap
vigor of graduate studies in days gone by is a realistic recognition
of the facts of todays academic labor market, they wrote.
Tenure-track appointments for Ph.D.s are steadily declining,
and the national trend is a rapid increase in the proportion of college
teaching done by part-time faculty and graduate instructors.

About 75 graduate students attended the trustees meeting at which
Dr. Amy Gutmann was elected Penns next president. Though not
included on the agenda, GET-UP chair David Faris interrupted the meeting
to address the board. We are united, determined, and angry.
We followed the rules and the law has been used against us.

You
can end this today, Faris told the trustees. You can drop this appeal,
you can come to the bargaining table, and you can help us make this
university a better place. But if you do not, we will do what we have
to do and we will see you in the street.

After Faris finished speaking, trustees chair James Riepe W65
WG67 responded: We will not have a debate, we will not
have this discussed here. But I only want to be quoted that we too
are playing by the rules as you are.
S.F.